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Comment by ggregoire | Hacker News Reader

Any idea why this is limited to AMD GPUs?

Because years ago NVIDIA screwed up the thermal solution in their laptop chips so they’d get so hot they’d unsolder themselves inside MacBook Pros, and then gave someone important at Apple the middle finger instead of helping to deal with the issue. Ever since then Apple does not use NVIDIA GPUs.

I would love to hear more details about this.

This was pretty well publicized circa 2008 when the events took place.

2012 and 2013 15" Macbook Pros used NVidia. I think Apple likes to alternate every generation or two, if only to keep their options open.

Or maybe 2012. It’s been a while.

2010 MBP does, for sure. I need to disable that one, and use the Intel GPU instead. Using the Nvidia GPU causes random reboots.

The fiasco was widely called "Bad Bumps" due to the issue being related to the solder used for the bumps on the underside of their chips.

It was a huge deal affecting major computer vendors like Apple, Dell, HP etc at the time, with failure rates on laptops with these chips being ridiculously high. I've also long wondered if this played a part in whatever reason Apple have for avoiding Nvidia GPUs for so long.

> https://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/11/why-nvidias-chips-are-de...

> http://www.tomshardware.com/news/NVIDIA-GPU-Chipset-Graphics...

Not usually a huge fan of theinquirer's tabloid style, but they did a pretty good job reporting on the issue back then.

> https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1047022/apple-note...

Apple has used Nvidia gpus many times since then. Whatever the reasons for Apple's vendor-hopping for GPUs, this isn't it.

Apple have used nVidia stuff a few times since the 8000 series solder screw ups.

2010, 2012, 2013 + 2014 MacBook Pro’s to name a few instances

macOS doesn't currently have Nvidia drivers from this generation (from what I remember). It supports a handful of mobile cards and no more, which is the extent to which Nvidia has been implemented in Apple computers as of late.

Meanwhile, the past few generations of graphics gear in Apple computers has been a pretty wide range of AMD stuff. Vega, Polaris, FirePro have all been represented in the last 5 or so years. All they had to do was modify the driver to be able to read from the TB3 PCIe device rather than just an internal one.

... but Nvidia has their own drivers for even the most recent graphics cards that work perfectly fine. Writing this from a OSX setup with a GTX1080.

I take it this is a hackintosh? Are you able to use it ok without signing into any iCloud services, or have you found a way around that?

AFAIK you were already able to use external GPUs via 3rd party thunderbolt enclosures, it just wasn't officially supported.

iCloud works perfectly fine on Hackintoshes.

I logged into one on Sierra. Every iCloud service I use got locked down over the next 20 minutes and it wasn’t fun getting them back. Turns out I’m rather locked into the Apple ecosystem. Somehow Apple detect hardware configuration and check it on login. The mess it left wasn’t pretty.

Perfectly? The latest drivers lag like crazy

This is unfortunately a known issue, at least in the community if not by nVidia. The current workaround is to patch an earlier known-good driver version to work on whatever release of High Sierra you're on. I'm currently running 387.10.10.10.25.106 on 10.13.3 without lag.

https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/nvidia-update

Interesting that some people have no lags. I have also used that script, but stutters are still present.

The drivers were great for a GTX 650Ti in 10.8 and 10.9. They worked fine for games like Borderlands 2 and Arkham Asylum.

The drivers are terrible for a GTX 1060 in 10.12. After running for a while, even basic desktop operations bog down to the point of being unusable. I haven't tried 10.13 yet.

I might be still using Sierra after hearing about all the issues with High Sierra. I don't want to spend a few days configuring my Hackintosh again!

I can confirm that Sierra and Capitan do have Nvidia drivers for Pascal series.

Are you sure? I have a gtx 970 working on the maxwell drivers on el cap but no luck on pascal.

Apple hasn't released a product with an NVIDIA GPU for years. Also, driver support for NVIDIA GPUs on MacOS is not very good compared to AMD GPU driver support on MacOS.

Nvidia driver support is fine, generally speaking. It's just Apple choose not to bundle drivers OOTB in the OS, but it's a trivial install from Nvidia's website. You can drop a brand new 1080ti into an old Mac Pro today and it will work great. Hackintosh users have also taken advantage of this for ages.

In fact Nvidia cards are the only ones that are recommended for hackintoshes for OOB compatibility [1]. IME on Mac OS 10.12 getting a Nvidia GTX 1060 to behave properly has been much easier than a AMD RX 480.

[1] https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/march/2018/#Graphics_....

That's definitely not true since at least summer last year (release date of WhateverGreen [1]). The drivers for Nvidia cards are currently pretty bad and are only getting worse (they used to work acceptably ok on Sierra). For example, Pascal based Nvidia GPUs on High Sierra often get something like 50% performance compared to Windows and they also cause the system to stutter. There are also many other problems with using them. For instance, you cannot update the system (even small updates) until Nvidia releases new drivers which sometimes takes few days.

While with AMD, the drivers for RX460/470/480/560/570/580/Vega are already built-in and you only need to correctly inject them. You just need to use one kext (kind of a driver in Mac) called WhateverGreen (to be fully correct you also need Lilu, but you almost always have it anyway on your Hackintosh). It works without issues and is generally preferred among Hackintosh community.

Another thing is that tonymacx builds are generally bad if you want a stable and easy to build Hackintosh (at least as easy as it can get). They are being sponsored and their choice of hardware is strongly biased.

[1] https://github.com/vit9696/WhateverGreen

I hadn't heard that criticism of tonymacx86 before. Could I ask which site (or sites) you recommend as less biased / more straightforward builds than tonymacx?

Wow I had no idea that tool existed. Getting hardware acceleration working was the main reason I replaced my R9-390x with a GTX1070.

Because AMD GPUs are the only discrete GPUs Apple supports on current models?

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